Welcome to Kasoft Base

Just a logo for Kasoft Base

Kasoft Base is the home page of Kasoft Base, the computer and the place.

Perhaps you meant to find out about Kasoft Software instead?

Kasoft Base: The Computer, the Page and the Place

This page displays Kasoft Base (the computer,) which represents the final evolution of technologies from the Acorn Computer Group. Kasoft Base is a Medusa RiscPC powered by an ARM610. This computer is currently kept at Kasoft Base (the place.)

Confusingly (or logically, depending on your perspective,) this page is also referred to as "Kasoft Base." It contains information about Kasoft Base, the computer.

Kasoft Software now has its own external page.

Ursula on Medusa

Kasoft Base runs two operating systems: the RISC OS 3.50 operating system which ran on the first Medusa RiscPCs, and a slightly modified RISC OS 3.80 operating system which ran on the Phoebe prototype (sometimes called Workstation Yellow*) at Acorn's workstation division. RISC OS 3.80 was eventually turned, by a group of companies and enthuisiasts in the Acorn scene, into RISC OS 4 after the workstation division's untimely demise.

(In what follows, we refer to RISC OS 3.50 as Medusa, as this is the only hardware it ran on, and as far as we know, it has no other name.)

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Kasoft Base has booted into Ursula, probably the only machine left on the planet which does so on a regular basis. Click above to see an animation.

The RISC OS 3.80 operating system (sometimes called RISC OS Black*) is exceedingly rare, and was never distributed to end-users, because it still contained some StrongARM dependent code. Kasoft managed to weed out the worst offences in this respect, and Ursula, as this operating system was called internally at Acorn, represents a stable and almost functionally identical alternative to RISC OS 4.

Phoebe was named after the Friends (US sitcom) character played by Lisa Kudrow, and the operating system was named after her evil twin who appeared in some episodes, Ursula, also played by Kudrow.

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Kasoft Base has booted into Medusa, but is still running the Ursula FileCore and ADFS modules so that it can access BaseGBHD. Click above to see an animation.

Because Kasoft Base has an 80 GB drive called BaseGBHD, booting into Medusa also loads the Filecore and ADFS modules from Ursula which support the big map E+ format of RISC OS 4. This format also supports filenames up to 255 characters.

The main reason why Medusa is retained at all is because of Ursula's poor support for legacy software such as games and graphical demonstrations.


* By me, mainly. (Ed.)


The material on this web site is subject to copyright.

This site is dedicated to my friend, Iain Truskett, who died at a much too young age. Rest in peace, pal.

Kasoft is a registered Australian trademark (in the category of software) of Kasoft Software, owned by Kade Hansson.

Author and editor: Kade "Archer" Hansson; e-mail: archer@kaserver5.org

Last updated: Sunday 3rd April 2005